I use the YAD dialog program quite a lot in my shell scripts. Written and maintained by Victor Ananjevksy, YAD is easy to use and has dozens of handy options. In previous Linux Rain articles demonstrating YAD (here, here and here), I used only the default YAD buttons, "Cancel" and…

If you are fortunate enough, your new shiny install of Baldurs Gate 2 Enhanced Edition will Just Work™. If you're on a fairly, what I call "late-model" distribution such as Arch Linux or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or even one of the latest (non-LTS) versions of Ubuntu, you might run into…

Being a rolling release distribution that touts the ability to have the latest stuff, you'll often find the very latest software in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. In the official repos, anyway. Certain software that is procured from external repositories such as Packman, however, this is not always the case.…

Alright, so, disclaimer. This will likely be most suited for advanced or at least intermediate level Linux users. If you love NetworkManager, look away now, because we're going to obliterate it from the system. Unless, of course, someone works out how to make NetworkManager use the 'wext' driver.…

Eyes hurting at night from the glare of your screen? Perhaps it's even affecting your sleep? Then maybe you should give Redshift a try, a program similar to Twilight on Android and inspired by the likes of f.lux. If you've heard of either Twilight or f.lux, you'll probably know what these sorts of…

If you have a Fitbit fitness device and wish to sync your device using the wireless dongle on your Linux machine, the good news is it is possible with the Bluetooth-based Fitbit devices, thanks to a small Python utility called Galileo. Note: you will need a bit of terminal-foo, but to be honest, I…

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is one of my personal favourite games of all time. Years ago I would have happily run the game in Linux, but the only real way to do so was through WINE. Thanks to OpenMW, a totally rewritten and open source engine for Morrowind, it is now very much possible to have…

If you're a Firefox user and you're a little fed up with going to Google Chrome every time in order to watch Netflix on your Linux machine, the good news is since Firefox 49 landed, HTML5 DRM (through the Google Widevine CDM (Content Decryption Manager) plugin) is now supported. Services that use…

Recently I was checking for unmatched braces in a big text file with nearly half a million lines (300+ MB). Was there a closing brace for every opening brace? The text file was called 'beetle' and was actually a tab-separated table with each line divided into 77 fields. What I wanted to do was find…

Flags in AWK are variables which are set to either true or false. They're handy for defining ranges over which AWK can act, as shown below. The AWK used here is GNU AWK 4.1.1 (gawk 4). Sometimes flags aren't needed I'll demonstrate with a simple text file called demo, which has 6 lines with 3…